It was a failing, hippie-era experiment in egalitarian education called the Miquon Upper School, which makes it sound a lot grander than it was. It was in a ramshackle house in Chestnut Hill, an hour away across town – I had to take two commuter trains to get there in the morning, and two to get back, which was its own kind of education. And it didn’t have grades in either sense, i.e. neither year-based distinctions of curriculum, or letter-based evaluations of performance. You called teachers